Netvibes pioneered the personalized feed reader and dashboard, earning numerous awards from TechCrunch, TIME, PC World and others for its user-centric design. Following the closure of Google Reader and iGoogle last year, more than 500,000 new users have recently joined the millions that have already been using Netvibes to manage their daily digital lives, crawling 25 million new articles per day.

For the last months, we’ve been gathering your feedback and brainstorming on how to improve our Reader. And today, we’re happy to introduce our all-new Netvibes Reader, thoughtfully designed for optimum readability on all devices, prioritizing slow feeds you might have otherwise missed and enabling users to curate content that matters to them. Let’s take a look at what’s new and how the best reader just got better…

Optimized text for maximum readability

Beautifully formatted, distraction-free. It’s a cleaner, more enjoyable way to view articles, images and videos.

Unified reading experience

Enjoy a consistent reading experience across all devices and screen sizes for desktop and tablets. No need to install separate apps.

Magic Mosaic Layout

Beyond just text, Netvibes helps you discover photos and design inspiration from the Web. Adaptive design automatically resizes images from articles into a beautiful, dynamic wall of visual content.

Slow Feeds Filtering

Getting buried? Make sure you never miss a post from your less frequently updated sources.

I miss the website view being applied to the entire feed too.
The current state makes some feeds useless/very tedious to view if you have to click inside each and every post.
———————————————–
To the developers: is this feature coming back?
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Can only second this, the missing option to show website content inline in the viewer renders about 30-40% of my feeds useless… can this please be re-added?? Netvibes user from day 1, but this would now be the end :/

Same here. The reader is almost worthless now. Now, if I click on a story, I only see a summary of the story, without the website hosting it. I have to click again to read the full story, which opens in a new tab in my browser — a worthless feature.

I hope you’ll bring back the website view inside the reader. Otherwise, Netvibes is almost useless as an RSS reader.

After many years of Netvibes I have moved away to uStart.org because only the top feeds are loaded — it becomes too slow to read feeds more towards the bottom. I guess I could have made many tabs with little content, but I migrated, and uStart is always loaded, so no wait at all. I do miss some of the maturity of Netvibes.

There is a way to switch to the old mosaic view but only for your private page.
Look at the upper left corner, next to the Add and Analyze green buttons. There you’ll find the switch for apps/reader view. Choose the reader view.

I second this comment – my vision is not so good and this new font is very hard to read. It’s almost making netvibes useless for me if I have to get out a magnifying glass to read things. (especially hard to read are the numbers).

Please tell me there’s a way to change it back. It was perfect before, now it’s considerably worse. It’s too bright, the feed sidebar is grey and hard to read while also wasting more space than it did before. Where’s the ‘dark’ theme?

You guys took something that wasn’t broken and tried to fix it. Please offer the previous layout to people who liked it the way it was.

1. High contrast Black&White layout hurting my eyes. Why option to change colors is removed (green skin was good)?
2. Every article is centered on 1/3 screen width (1920×1080). Step back in readibility.
3. No automatic sorting from old to new articles.

Yes the lack of a dark theme makes it fairly unusable to me. I can appreciate changes to add new features, but netvibes was the only google reader alternative i liked. I now I don’t. Time to start looking again.

You used to have the “RSS/Web” option at the bottom of a feed. When I set it to “web”, I could read the entire post in NetVibes without having to open a separate tab or window. Where is that option located now that you’ve have the feed posts in RSS mode?

One suggestion: in Expanded View, make the break line between items more proeminent, maybe thicker. The way it is the dividing horizontal line is so minimal that we can barely see when a post ends and a new one starts.

PS. I noticed the vertical green bar on the left marking the item currently being read, but it really doesn’t help either.

Overall more attractive at the sake of usability. Desktop user for reference.

Font is a lot less enjoyable to read.
Too much leading. I have to scroll constantly.
Too much white space, not enough information.
Dislike that it centers everything.
Miss being able to immediately tell what site the article was on.

Google went through a similar change a few years ago (making everything look like Google+) which caused me to abandon ship and use netvibes (bloglines). I prefer an RSS reader that’s information dense, that’s why I’m using one in the first place.

That was exactly my though. I really like the new reader but there’s too much white space. I want to quickly scan headlines and then dive into the articles that interest me. It would be nice if there was setting for “compact” to compress the white space and get more headlines per page.

The other thing that seems to have disappeared is a direct link to the website. I know there’s a “web view” but I have to open the article first and then click on the web view. But not ever web site was intended to viewed in an iframe. I can click on the article’s title (I assume that works everywhere or is that dependant on the source?) but again that introduces unnecessary clicks.

Otherwise the new reader is really nice and it’s re-assuring to see NetVibes evolving their product. Thanks,

Paragraphs need an indication. Indent or line space. This should greatly help readability.

Feeds automatically refreshing seems like a great idea. Using it though means if I start doing some work before finishing an article my place will be lost. It’s strange to bring a browser tab back up to find the page has changed.

(Using RSS mode in Firefox on a desktop) What’s happened to the “go to article on website” link on each entry? The only thing with an arrow that I can see is now a Share gadget (Do Not Want, by the way). The biggest advantage of Netvibes over Google Reader (apart from that it still exists!) was that I could load the actual article (complete with its comments, for instance) without automatically marking it as read. I want an RSS reader to point and link me to what’s new, not to read everything on, especially now that it’s narrower.

(However, note for people complaining about it being only one-third of the screen: there’s a dingbat with 3 horizontal bars at right and left of the header that’ll collapse the sidebar you don’t use.)

I don’t know whether the star’s new or just used to be somewhere I hadn’t noticed it, but that’s useful. “Recently read” might be useful if I’ve accidentally marked the wrong thing. The rest of the changes, meh.

In the expanded view, is there any way to get rid of the vast expanses of white space to the left of each item – it looks like there’s supposed to be a picture there, but nothing appears.

I’d also like the banding back, to separate the stories from each other.

In general, I much prefer the old layout. The new version is spaced-out far too much, both horizontally and vertically and there is far, far too much whitespace – I used to get 5-10 stories to a page, now I get 2. Which is great if I want to read all stories in a feed, but previously I could quickly scroll through and read the ones I was interested in, now that’s far more difficult

I like the overall cleaner feel of this reader mode, but I have a few problems with it that are fairly significant.

There is way too much bright, white space. It was hurting my eyes. The main text is more than double-spaced with max width of 600px and massive padding so there’s empty white space on each side and anything over three or four lines of text takes up multiple pages with huge gaps between each line. I am able to fix this on my main computers by fiddling with the CSS via a Grease Monkey script, but that does nothing for me on other computers.

The left sidebar is too faint of text on that grey background. I could fiddle with that as well, but it is an annoyance not actually giving me headaches like the other so I haven’t bothered yet. I have nothing in the other sidebar (Livebar) so I don’t care about it at the moment.

The old reader moved items up as I clicked “N” to move to the next entry so whatever was the focus was at the top. It no longer does this so I will frequently have two or three short entries at the top of the page while I can only see the header of the one I am supposedly actually reading at the very bottom of my screen and the rest of that entry continues on so I have to spacebar or scroll down to see it. The active item should automatically move to either the top or second position on the page.

Horrible, horrible , horrible. Why did you reset my selection of web view as the default. And now when I do select it, I get this tiny little small window where I have to scroll constantly. Did you actually run this design by any real users? This is a real pain in the ass.

The clean, compact mode with everything visible with one click was what brought me to Netvibes – along with great navigation. This new design takes up so much room and leaves so much white, wasted space for… well, for what? To get the clean, minimalistic feel that designers use for other web pages? To me, this is absolutely the wrong approach for a RSS feed reader.

Kinda digging the old reader, still prefer netvibes yesterday but this may work.

Would love to see netvibes refined though with some of the feedback received. I do like it’s use of dark gray instead of black for text and clean look. Just needs some help for usability (it’s main function).

Like many others who have commented already, I HATE the new color scheme. The nav bar on the left is particularly bad — what is this ridiculous fad of light gray on a dark background? Do all the web designers think people only use their sites for 30 seconds at a time? I probably spend an hour a day in Netvibes tracking dozens of feeds and over a thousand articles per day.

If I have to stick with this hideous color scheme I’m looking for an alternative to Netvibes.

(The color issue is far from my only gripe, but I’ll stop here or this will turn into a very long and not very useful rant.)

Second that gripe as well. The Grey-on-grey colour scheme for the navigation bar is horrible. And the huge “My Netvibes Feeds” block (and the enormous title bar that it is aligned with) are yet another huge waste of space as well.

Can see nothing but the top header line with thew app / reader switch on the new reader layout, cannot see anything below, you have made the netvibes reader view, which was the only one I used useless which is a pity as up until 11 am today it was a great RSS reader to replace Google reader with and whose only fault was it did not have an android app. Now I have to look for a new RSS reader to replace google reader and netvibes with.

Got to transfer my feeds, so just a thought for netvibes developers – track how many more people will download their feeds for transfer in next few days. Maybe that will give you an idea. New design is fugly, unreadable, grey-on-grey with tons of wasted space.

Rubbish. I dont mind chancge but not when it is for the worst. Cannot be read on my iPad or wife’s Galaxy. Completely unreadable. Have to click on each post to be able to read the full article in a seperate tab. Very hard to read. Too much white space and who want a share button as the major click button. Make it open full article. Please listen to your subscribers for once.

Unless I’m missing something, the site has lost the ability to scroll through all the items in a feed while in the feed view. It used to be that if you were viewing a feed item and then clicked on “read all”, all the items in the feed would show up on the page and you could just scroll through them with page up and down. This doesn’t work anymore.

And I second everyone’s complaints about the massive amounts of white space on either side of the narrow column of text in the reader view. It makes it very hard to read comfortable. I much prefer the density of the previous version.

Just have to add another comment about what a waste of effort this redesign is. Can you honestly say it met any of your goals?

Now when I try to use web view and the list of additional articles is in the dark grey sidebar to the left…..the old sidebar wrapped the text. this one doesn’t and I have to widen it out at the expense of the web view. Before it was so easy to scan down the articles due to the compact nature now they are one long line that is not as easy to scan. what a fail.

Could anybody explain to me the purpose of the checkmarks on posts? Before the upgrade I was able to select all, then uncheck a few of them and mark checked as read. Today that option is not there. I was curious what the checkboxes are for but I don’t see any action I can perform with checked messages.

The more I look at this, the more I dislike it. There’s literally nothing in the normal interface that isn’t worse than it was before (kind of like the mosaic view, but would only use it about once per year).

I love netvibes, the update is great BUT and that is a real no go, the mosaic view was the reason behind me going for netvibes. Please give us back the old mosaic or make 23 choices because that one is not fine at all

Where did website view go? It was one of the best things about netvibes! 🙁 It allowed you do see websites without having to launch new tabs all the time. Also, because the sidebar is one line instead of two it’s much harder to read the subject lines. Visually a step forward, but productively a step back.

Okay, I found the buried website view. Look, as a graphic designer I admire your respect for whitespace. But as a team I think you let the opinion of visual designers trump those who understand workflow and efficiency and good UI. Think about how much useless header space there is in the website view. And the borders on each side, really? Why not get rid of the borders and the header space so the website view can occupy the whole area? Makes more sense. Content is king, and you’re making it hard to access!

Please add the option for a dark theme , all this white is hurting eyes, dark grey and green was a good choice for the old theme, with this new one, spending time on netvibes is very unpleasant and leads to headaches.

Another issue I just noticed: I can’t find a way in the new design to remove an item from my saved list. Clicking the star does nothing. If I use my iPhone, the new layout is atrocious and unusable there, but if I force it to the old mobile version, I can still remove items from what is there called “Read Later” and that removes them from the “Saved” list on my laptop in the new layout, but I should be able to remove items from “Saved” on my laptop.

Please give some options to change colors. Reading on white on a computer screen for extended periods of time is very painful. I miss the old color scheme. I won’t be able to continue using this site if it hurts my eyes to use.

Setting all images to a fixed width (600px, is it?) effectively renders some of the comics I follow unreadable within the reader – the text is simply too tiny. Please fix this (i.e. leave images alone… the person who created them knows better than anybody else what size they should be displayed at).

I’m a Google Reader refugee and so far I’ve been very pleased with Netvibes, but I’ll regrettably have to move elsewhere… while pretty, the reader is now hardly usable for me. So, again, please fix this.

The old version offered the opportunity to select all of the items in a feed, then deselect some and then apply a function (like “Mark Read”) to the ones remaining. This was great when I wanted to keep certain items unread but didn’t want to star them.

Please add my vote to those that would like the option to go back to the old layout.

screw up big time.
I was a Google reader user and find you when reader died, and i love you because your site was much much better. You was the best.
Now you did with netvibes same thing Microsoft did it with win 8. Very, very big fail but with fancy design.
I’m so sad.

Good to see some work being done on this, reading on an iPad has been an exercise in frustration. There’s way too much white space though, both in the left hand feed list and margins around the articles — in portrait mode the articles are only getting around 7 words a line. Also I HATE sites which disable pinch-to-zoom.

Why do posts only use the middle 1/3 of the screen? It’s like trying to read a newspaper through a keyhole.
I’m still missing the option to read posts from oldest to newest. So now it’s like reading a newspaper starting with the back page with the added nonsense of looking at it through a keyhole.

I shouldn’t have to sit less than 18 inches from my monitor to read anything.

Just adding my voice to the “too much white space” crowd. Viewing the reader on my laptop’s 1920 x 1080 screen looks ridiculous. There’s more white space than text. I’m sure it looks great on a vertically oriented tablet screen (and likely the reason for the redesign), but on a desktop it’s just silly.

The lack of white space between paragraphs also makes reading rather difficult. Some RSS posts just look like a skinny wall of double-spaced text, especially if the end of a paragraph just happens to be on the very right hand side of the column of text. Check out AnandTech’s RSS feed for numerous examples of this.

I agree with those who do not like the change. First, I think it is ugly and it not the way I want to view. How can I make the website view my default setting? Also, the website view is too small; even maximizing the window and resizing the article sidebar there is too much whitespace around the website view (it also makes it so you can’t read the article names).

I could go on, but others have covered it. I’ll just say, “I don’t want my reader to look like a tablet. I hate how tablets look.”

I was going to “inform you” that I could only see 4 lines of text above the fold, b/c there was no way folks at bloglines could have intended such an unusable reading format — but then I looked at the illustration at the top of this entry, and realized that this is intentional.

If that’s how you all feel a site geared to reading should look, well that’s cool, but now that I understand this was a purposeful decision, I’m outa here. This is crazy pants.

Exported state and switched to The Old Reader. It is not nearly as polished as the old Netvibes, but the new UI here is horrible. A news reader isn’t supposed to be eye candy. It should have high information density and be easy to navigate.

Looks nice, maybe some more contrast would be better. I am using the reader and 2 things are quite annoying:
1) I have to click 2 times to tell the reader I read all the posts. That is really ugly, because it is maybe the most used function/button of the reader
2) If I click on the topic of a posts and it opens, the topic is on the left side and the content is in the middle of the screen. So I need to look “left – right – left – right…” to read through lots of posts. That is very stressful for the eyes, would be better to have the content on the left side too!

Nice update, but (everything has already been said, but I’d like to add my vote on the following):

1) Not enough contrast. The feed tabs bar on the left is hard to read. There is white on black to read on the left, and black on white to read on the right. It’s hard for the eyes. I don’t mind the white on black on the left, I like it actually, but in that case the white characters are too dark, it’s hard to find a feed. Will there be themes again?
2) An option to see oldest items first would be great (I use “only show unread items”).
3) Two clicks to mark all items as read is too much. Should be one click max. Likewise, that would be good if there was no confirmation popup when using the ‘A’ shortcut (I want to use a keyboard shortcut, why do I have to take my mouse in order to click “OK”?).
4) The big font and big spaces between lines is sometimes nice, but I like to see the more content possible on my screen. It takes to much scrolling to browse my feed tabs (or even the feed items content). An option to have a smaller font and smaller spaces between lines would be great. I get that everything needs to be “big” for tablets/phones UI, but on my desktop it’s just silly!
5) Why only use a small part of the screen to display feed items? I need to scroll and scroll and scroll in order to read feeds, while there is a lot of blank on the left & right of my feeds content.

I agree with a lot of the comments – way too much whitespace – this means a lot more scrolling to read articles as they are only displayed in a small section of the screen. Was this possibly only tested on small resolution devices?

Its also a real shame you have to click website view on every link – used to be a really nice feature of Netvibes that you didn’t have to do this – sounds minor but this makes reading every article take 2 clicks instead of 1 and that does make a difference. There may well be some back end changes that have forced this, but it would definitely be good to go back the previous version as an option. Just like when the mobile version changed, it may well be time to look at other sites to see what they have to offer. A definite shame Netvibes doesn’t offer a low cost subscription service (not $499/mo!) where subscribers could have more control over these kind of changes.

Thank you for listening and responding. In the short term, an option to go back to the old view would help a lot. In the long term, a few different theme options (dark/high contrast/etc.) and spacing options (compact. etc.) would probably make most of the complaints go away. Although I agree with many that we’ve gone from a quick and easy UI to multiple clicks everywhere, and that’s a step backwards.

– The color and contrast is so bad to read
The sidebar text color intuitivley looks like all is marked as
“read” or is “inactive”
– The whole page looks like a translucent, grey mist is layered on
top of everything.
– the line spacing in the list, text,
sidebar is terrible to read AND waste of space
– where is the “visit website” button (arrows)
right next to the listed (not opened) item?
Really need that !
– the order of my feeds is totally scrambled now?
– the wide white borders left&right of the text….
i understand the point of better readability with
not too wide text-blocks, and for that
– and only for that – this may be “better”.
I use the browser on 1920 – half wide of the screen
anyway, so this does not bother me anyways.
– what is it with “priorizing less often updated feeds?”
Only thing i notice is, that a lot of (very active) feeds
dont update at all. some feeds lack entire days of updates now.
feeds which are def. technically ok, so it has to be somoe issue
with the intake. To make it even more absurd, i fetched the
same feed-adress of one of this feeds and put it directly one
under the other (2 identical feeds) and neither of them is up
to date but both lack different amount of items. wtf?

as many said before. a feed-reader is for content. for lots of content. i want an intelligent option to sort and filter, categorize, so i can get the 5% thats relevant to me at the time. this 5% is for a lot of people still a wall of text, and it is most significant to get all this content as perfect together, that i can look through that with as little effort and time as possible.

right now the service is not usable for me anymore. i have paused any news-reading for the last days, after i quitted the hope to adapt to the new design. I will not adapt to this for the sake of being informed.

Last thing: i REALL hate the trend to make a uniform look and take mobile devices as framework for this. maybe this is nice for mobile users, but it’s a hammer to the knee for all desktop users.
For gods sake, make an iOS/Android app, or a mobile version of the page, if you want to please your mobile customers. right now it feels as every desktop user is unwanted anyways.

I originally switched to Netvibes Reader specifically because Google Reader adopted a similar style. Very disappointed with the changes made. The layout now mirror’s Feedly, which I was never a big fan of on the desktop but rather like they’re Android App. Now that the big differentiating features of Netvibes are gone, looks like I will have to migrate elsewhere.

i did not choose to use the new layout, but the new is now creeping into my old and making it really shitty and borderline unusable and unreadable. it was perfectly fine, usuable and readable before. glad netvibes is free.

I don’t like the new UI, but I can live with it. It’s less of a change than switching from Google Reader to Netvibes in the first place.

One feature that I would greatly appreciate, however: Font size. Did you decrease the size of the text in the feed pane? It’s tiny and hard to read. I can use my browser to inflate all the text on the page, but that makes the feed list on the left useless — at a readable font size, only three feeds (or feed groups) are visible at a time.

I don’t think it’s a terrible layout, but it does annoy me that the shortcut for next unread (J) now focusses the article at the bottom of the screen, instead of moving the selected article to the top.

As it previous was, it was easily to quickly scan. Now, with the article at the bottom, its location is always slightly different, which requires more ‘eye adjustment’, breaks the flow, and is remarkably slower.

(I was talking btw about the ‘Expanded View’, in case that’s relevant here).

Perhaps keeping the selected article at the top of the window also deals with the ‘load new articles’-behaviour. Currently, if I scroll through my feeds with J and come across the end of the loaded articles, Netvibes will automatically load the new articles (that’s good) but place the selected article back with two articles (not so good).

So, if new articles are loaded, I need to press three times on J; two times to get back to the end of the list and one time to get the newest article that was just loaded.

I also find this confusing so I have to check every time which article is selected after a reload, which breaks the flow of processing RSS feeds.

You really messed up this one. When I go to read the detail of a feed article sometimes it only shows the title, sometimes it shows the title and a fragment of the first paragraph, sometimes it shows the whole article as it did before. I can’t figure out the rhyme or reason.

I hate the new look. Most of all, I hate the glaring white background. That is the major point that everyone hates. I had go to great length finding a good RSS feeder, and Netvibes is good simply because I can set dark background and the layout is totally awesome.

The new layout is less acceptable. The previous one is better. So its better that we have a choice of using the old one. Its like taking a step backward.

Why don’t you make a poll of your users and see how the users are embracing this. Then shows us the result of the pole.

Two days charging my feeds is too much time. I guess this product just does not work. I hope you improve it. I tried Google Reader Feedly AOL Reader Digg Reader and Inoreader and Netvibes was a good news but is not working at all.

Your MOSAIC view is not usable for me (and some others, I think), you only show details of the pics. I propose a solution like in tumblr archives, for ex. http://ofnaturesbeauty.tumblr.com/archive
beautiful and usable…

Thank god for the old layout switch. I have a four columns layout that allows me to skim through heaps of content really fast. The new layouts offered don’t answer that need at all.

Funny, i was wondering when new changes would come from Netvibes just the other day. I’m glad you are actually on it but for now, please please please do not drop the old view for it is the best i’ve found and i did look everywhere 🙂

Apart from the excess of white space “mark all as read” really needs to be a single click operation again. Coupled with the fact the action menu doesn’t work properly on a touch screen (the menu expands but never collapses again) it make the website very annoying to use on a touch device (windows 8.1, IE 11)

Another really annoying thing is the paragraph formating. Displaying directly in Netvibes loses any formating. line breaks vanish, left/right/center formating vanishes, free lines vanish, indenting vanishes.
What is left is a big wall of text without any formating. It’s so bad, you cant distinguish quotes in a text, if they are indented.
To modify the original formating of a text is such a bad style.

There are so much things to fix here, i really hope you get all that negative feedback and take it seriously.
And please don’t do it the “google-style” (i.e. ignoring just long enough, so everybody shuts up sooner or later.)
There are a lot of good alternatives for RSS-Readers, i don’t think you are in a position to do it the google style.

I for one am using the old reader right now (which is not perfect at all, but the best quick alternative now) and keep watching what happens on my netvibes page because i am still willing to go back.

Please reactivate the old website view and feed scrolling features soon. I understand that once in a while it helps to bring in an upgrade to the look & feel, and to features. But this new version has sacrificed the whole usability advantage over other readers that made browsing news and blog updates easy.

Why is it developers believe they need to change what works so their products look and act just like everyone else’s? Set yourself apart!

Also, the title of this article is a bit insulting, implying that any way different than what you are pushing is wrong and dumb. If you gave people different options instead of forcing one particular way on them you would be getting much more positive feedback.

Does anyone from Netvibes care to reply to the numerous complaints above? Is anyone there even reading this thread?

I’m shocked that anyone would do to NV what we’ve seen in a post-Win8 Debacle world.

PLEASE give us a way to revert to the old interface. I strongly agree with the comments above about colors, spacing, reformatting text, etc., and it’s painfully clear that what we have here is a case of form taking precedence over function, which almost never works in design.

It’s not too late to undo this mess and show that you’re more responsive to users and more capable of enlightened self-interest than Microsoft. (I know, that’s a pretty low standard, but it applies.)

Since the rollout of the new version, my list of items that were “saved for later” is now empty – it previously contained about 2 dozen articles I was holding onto for research purposes. How can I get those back?

I think the really key problem is this statement: “Enjoy a consistent reading experience across all devices and screen sizes for desktop, smartphones and tablets. No need to install separate apps.”

As Microsoft proved with its disastrous Windows 8 UI, people don’t want a consistent reading experience, they want one optimised for their device, which is similar enough to other version to be usable. A UI which is optimised for touchscreen is really truly horrible on a desktop machine, and that’s what has been implemented here.

I echo most of the comments here in not liking the new version of the reader. I find it hard on the eyes to read. It now takes two clicks for me to ‘Mark all as read’ where before it could be done with one. etc. Unless there is a way I can load the old reader I will be searching for a new tool…

I don’t want a touchscreen optimized layout on my desktop. It’s awful. Far too much white space in expanded view and everywhere, really. The feedlist has too much space between each feed. I do not have to poke them with my fingers, I’m using a mouse because I’m on a desktop, not a tablet. Now I have to scroll my feed list for new entries whereas before I could just take it in in a glance.
Please provide an option to change back.

I did just not like elements of the new design, but now it is actively messing me up. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been in the middle of reading a long article and suddenly it disappears before my eyes. Apparently the autoloading of new posts is causing it to move down the screen, forcing me to go hunting for the article I was reading. Additionally, scrolling through posts clicking “n” will suddenly jump to a newly loaded post, forcing me to re-scroll past several articles I’ve previously read to get back to wherever I left off or to just reload the page. This is ridiculous.

Am I the only one that thinks this new “improved” look is a mess? There seems to be no way to change the color scheme or the way my feed looks? Granted, I’m using this for free – but this is such a step backwards I’m thinking about revisiting the search for my replacement to Google Reader. Major fail here, Netvibes.

Thanks for addressing some of the complaints. However, does this list mean you are not going to fix the poor contrast problems? If the low contrast interface is here to stay, my middle aged eyes will need to go elsewhere.

Thanks netvibes, much improved! 🙂 A few more suggestions:
– thank you for making the website view wider and persistant! Doing so however made the inside website’s vertical scroll bar hide behind netvibes own scrollbar. It’s now impossible to scroll in the iframe because the netvibes scroll bar overlaps it. :

I think this happens because the netvibes scrolling is based on the “Reader view”…so if the reader view is larger than the iframe window, you get two scrollbars on top of each other.

– Can you make the persistent header smaller? Content is king, I’m not sure people really need to see the title of the web content all the time, in a big header font. At the very least, the header text could be put to the left of the checkmark, and the authoring information put beneath it as it is now. Also, you could sacrifice some of the top space to put more whitespace under the author information.

It’s now impossible to scroll in the iframe because the netvibes scroll bar overlaps it. : Yes, very annoying, that!

Another annoyance: For navigating though the unread articles, you now have to get hold of the light grey oval shape and schlepp it around. Before, I always clicked just above it or just below it, thus moving exactly to where I hadn’t been yet. Now, when you click there, you are inside an article. And for putting your cursor exactly on the (quite narrow) oval light grey shape, you must make quite accurate hand movements (more risk of RSI).

This is great news! Thank you for the very welcome improvements.
If I can still nitpick a little I’d say that in addition to the upcoming compact view (yay!), you could look into:

-scrolling precision of articles – as it is, when I browse with P/N shortcuts the articles sometimes open in the middle – looks like some images that load that last make the top of the article jump up and out of view
This makes these shortcuts a little less useful if I need to correct the view each time
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-(in case the compact mode isn’t going to include the following) take a look at the website view for http://theinspirationgrid.com/ for example – the screen-space usage is not very efficient to say the least – the content itself has less than half of the height of my laptop screen.
Three things could be improved here:
* the topmost bar – the dark one with add/analyze buttons could very well be collapsible – most of the time I don’t need to see it
* the enormous white title bar could also be collapsable or at least much, much thinner with just the buttons visible if needed
* there should be more space to scroll the webpage itself, seen as webpages nowadays often include tall unscrollable title banners as well.
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-last but not least: contrast of the feed list / themes / colors (the whole shebang, the works if you can pull it off 🙂 ) and readability of the unread number count

I mostly like this, but I’d like a way to group headlines by source, instead of having all headlines shuffled into a single time-ordered list. In the app-style view, I would see the top 10 or 15 recent headlines grouped by site, but now all the sites are mashed together. I know I can click and view each site’s headlines individually, but I like being able to scan the top headlines of each news source quickly without clicking anything. So yeah, short version, please allow me to group my headline list by news source.

Till then, I’m back to the old app view. (I really really like the changes otherwise and I hope to switch to the new reader soon.)

I have one more suggestion for you 🙂 , a cosmetic change really.
To the left of the post titles there’s just enough room for favicons. They’re present when viewing multiple feeds, I know. When reading a single feed the lack of the favicon makes the posts seem sort of ‘naked’, not sure how to explain it better.
An option to turn them on even in single feed view would be very nice.

Netvibes: All I want is an information-dense news reader. Went through iGoogle, then tried MyYahoo until they did what you just did a few months ago. Unusable. Then Netvibes became my reader of choice. Outstanding! But based on the above comments, I am not even going to try the new view.

Perhaps if you explained WHY you tried to fix something that was working well, we might understand. It’s usually about the money. Next, it’s about keeping up with the hardware. But you need users for either strategy. Based on above comments above, you are going to lose more users than you gain.

Thanks for listening to feedback Netvibes team, the website view is now working beautifully again. I generally like the look and feel of your redesign and now that this, for me, essential piece of functionality is restored I’m looking forward to exploring the rest of it in more detail.
Appreciatively yours, Rob

Im not keen on this but perhaps there are some features that Im not aware of. Its like a new product that I need to learn from scratch and its frustrating when I just need it to work!!! Is there video or walkthrough of how to actually use it?